Although not talked about as much today, the paywall phenomena is still largely brewed behind closed doors at publisher meetings.  For the most part, many publishers (the smart ones anyway) have sat back to see the results of the brave and first to market and so to date, we have seen that Freedom Communications drop their news site paywall and Rupert Murdoch has yet to move all of his titles to a paywall formula as he had  promised to do by the end of the summer.

Undoubtedly, Murdoch has been the biggest champion when it came to the paywall argument, so to see him not follow through as he had touted should cause everyone considering the move to question.  In fact, of recent, we are hearing some rumblings that advertisers and inhouse journalists are speaking negatively about the Time Online paywall.  Rob Lynam, who is the head of press trading at  MEC agency, and whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says, “We are just not advertising on it. If there’s no traffic on there, there’s no point in advertising on there.” Lynam further went on to say that he has been told by News International insiders that traffic to The Times site has fallen by 90 per cent since the introduction of paywalls.

In addition to negative advertiser reactions to paywalls, Times Online journalists too have complained, as they are being overlooked for fist hand access to stories, as those telling them want to ensure their story is seen.

We’ve mentioned many times before that there are ‘must haves’ that need to be in place before one even thinking about introducing paywalls and the list of ‘must haves’ will cause you to think about how you can differentiate your product from the other “me too” products that exist.

What is your compelling value proposition that will encourage users to pay for access to your news content?